Kromaia launched on Steam

Today we want to highlight another game based on Ogre3D that made its way successfully onto Steam: Kromaia. Check it out on Steam and watch the trailer at the end of this post.

The frantic old-school action of classic coin-op shoot-‘em-ups comes crashing headlong into the 21st century with Kromaia, exclusively for PC. Explosive high-octane blasting combines with hordes of enemies in a 360˚ environment, allowing you to fly, spin and shoot anywhere and everywhere!

Where most shooters see you racing along a fixed path to blast anything in your way, Kromaia does things differently. Set in three-dimensional space, you’re free not just to explore but also dodge and blast through hordes of enemies all intent on destroying you! With your objectives spread out in all directions, it’s a true test of high-speed flying and sharpshooting skill – only the greatest space pilots need apply!

The Bigger They Are… – Survive through all your objectives and you’ll have a bigger challenge ahead: gigantic bosses that need to be destroyed before they destroy you!

Take Your Pick – Four unique craft, each with their own style of weaponry, let you experience the action of Kromaia in your own way. Rapid-fire guns, homing shots, powerful blasts or melee strikes… it’s totally up to you!

As usual we asked the developers to share some insights into their development process and their experience with Ogre:

Ogre linked statically

Used libraries: Bullet for physics, OIS for input and Irrklang for sound

Modelling + texturing is done in Wings3D

Development time: 5 years

Team size: 2 developers

Visual style: Heavy use of gloom and and depth of field shaders to center the player’s attention on the important things

The glow shader is based on the glow shader from the Ogre Wiki. The scene is rendered twice, one pass with a linear fog, that hides anything beyond 1-2 km and the second one without fog. Glow and blur is then applied to the render without fog together with a tone mapping function and then combine the result with the render with fog. The result is a scene with a lot of glow and a blur that grows with distance, increasing the depth perceived in the scene.

Probably the most unusual thing we did has to do with multithreading. We have the game logic running in one thread and Ogre running on a separate thread. We wanted to make sure the logic and physics could run at 100 FPS while the graphics could move slower and still make the game feel fluid (and I must say it works great ). More details about the used technique can be found in a blog post we wrote to explain it in detail:http://www.krakenempire.com/blog/?p=39

On the current build we manage to have more than 1000 dynamic physical objects moving freely in a 3D space on any decent PC.